The Mad Thinker was originally a criminal named The Thinker who used advanced computers and his intellect to plan out every detail of a crime in order to have the best chance of success. He was virtually unknown until the day he gathered together the crime bosses all around the country and announced that he would take over New York and establish it as a sovereign nation with himself as the ruler. Though the one obstacle to the plan was the Fantastic Four, and so the Thinker designed a plan in which he would cause each of the members of the four to be offered ideal jobs, which would distract them away from the Baxter Building. This ploy worked and the Thinker and his allies took advantage of an expected meteor strike which shut off power to New York City, allowing them to break into the Baxter Building. This gave the Thinker access to all of Reed Richard’s knowledge and experiments. Using Richards' research into DNA, he created his first version of the Awesome Android. The Fantastic Four eventually returned to find the Thinker had taken over the Baxter Building, and they defeated him with the help of their mailman, Willy Lumpkin, who was instructed to push the doorbell at 4 o’clock, thereby shutting down all of Reed’s equipment.

The Thinker was imprisoned and dubbed “The Mad Thinker” by the media, which is a notion he detests. Since then, the Mad Thinker has spent a lot of his time in prison, frequently escaping by using his mind to transfer his consciousness into a series of Mad Thinker androids and committing his crimes while still physically in prison. The Mad Thinker was also one of the villains that Doctor Doom coerced into disrupting Reed and Sue's wedding, though Iron Man appeared and stopped him.

He has continued to construct new, more advanced androids, and later found and resurrected the original android Human Torch in order to fight the Fantastic Four. Though the original Torch soon turned on him, refusing to be a party to murder, and he destroyed it with his sentient computer, Quasimodo. Along with multiple confrontations with the Fantastic Four, the Mad Thinker has also faced many other heroes, including the Avengers, Spider-Man, Captain America, and the X-Men. The Mad Thinker recently teamed up with his sometime-ally, the Puppet Master, in order to take advantage of the chaos caused by the Super Hero Registration conflict.